Kersten, Alan

FAU's Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry hosts an annual symposium where students engaged in undergraduate research may present their findings either through a poster presentation or an oral presentation.

Laney, Campbell, Heuer, and Reisberg (2004) proposed that the preferential recall of
central relative to peripheral information in a negative event (known as "memory
narrowing") is the product of presenting participants with a visually arousing attention
magnet -- not negative emotion, as the Easterbrook ( 1959) hypothesis suggests. Laney et
al. used conceptually meaningful (or thematically arousing) events to stimulate an
emotional response in participants instead of visual arousal and found evidence that
negative arousal improves memory for all categories of details. The current study tested
Laney et al. 's theory that a visually arousing stimulus, rather than negative arousal, is
responsible for memory nan·owing as well as their position that negative arousal benefits
recall of both central and peripheral information. Support was found for both assertions
of Laney et al. The presence of a visually salient and emotionally provoking detail
produced an effect similar to the traditional memory narrowing pattem and exposure to
the negative thematic climax resulted in improved memory performance for all the detail
categories. However, this latter effect was observed only for the female participants. No
evidence was found to support the Easterbrook hypothesis.

In the current experiment, a group of 10-year-olds and a group of young adults
watched a series of short video clips of different women performing different actions.
One week later, participants were tested on their ability to discriminate the old videos
from distracter videos, which included new actor/old action videos, new action/old actor
videos, novel combinations of familiar actors and actions, as well as entirely new videos.
The results provide evidence that the ability to accurately bind actors with their actions
reaches adult levels by age 10. The results are discussed in terms of the brain areas
involved in memory binding tasks, as well as implications for various areas of study
within forensic psychology, particularly unconscious transference.

The current study sought to examine further the concept of
eyewitness memory for events. Specifically, using filmed events that were
performed with objects and events performed without objects, we explored
the potential interaction of the object cue and binding or conjunction
errors. This specific memory error involves improperly pairing two or more
feature memories together in the long-term store. In our study, these
features were the action and the actress performing the action. Our study
involved 51 participants. Participants were shown target events in Week 1
and asked to retrieve the target events from a larger group of events in
Week 2. While findings did not show the expected interaction of
conjunction events to object presence or absence, objects without an
object showed a significantly higher acceptance rate. A secondary analysis revealed an interaction effect between head-focus and
recognition item type, meaning participants did view events without an
object differently from objects with an object.

Kersten, Earles, and Berger (2015) reported a distinction between two kinds of motion representations. Extrinsic motions involve the path of a person or object, with respect to an external frame of reference. Intrinsic motions involve the manner in which the various parts of a person or object move. They found that intrinsic motions are encoded and remembered with the corresponding actor performing the motions in a unitized memory representation. Extrinsic motions are encoded as separate memory representations, making them more difficult to accurately associate with the correct actor. In the proposed experiment, I will examine the generality of this distinction in motion representation, and investigate whether the unitization of intrinsic motion with its corresponding actor occurs during reading comprehension tasks.

The current study examined the role of complexity and initial variability of
exemplars during learning in verb generalization. Children and adults learned two novel
verbs in the context of two novel creatures across two sessions. After a second training
session, participants completed a generalization task during which they were required to
identify the verbs when presented with seven novel creatures of varying levels of
complexity. Performance was compared across age group and condition. Participants who
initially learned the verbs in the context of a single, simple exemplar demonstrated a
higher proportion of correct responses than participants who initially learned the verbs
with both a simple & complex exemplar. These results provide evidence that fewer
exemplars during initial training of novel verbs may increase learning in young children,
as well as some evidence that complex exemplars may increase the difficulty of learning
and generalizing verbs.

This study looked at the effects of stereotypes in the media on memory for ambiguous events. The latter were stimuli created to portray individuals of two different racial groups (white and black) in situations that did not necessarily negatively implicate these actors. Two hundred and thirty six participants took part and viewed these events as well as six media clips. Three groups of media clips were shown: clips with black actors, white actors, and both races. A subset of participants, the explicit condition, were asked to rate the media clips for stereotypes, whereas another group, the implicit condition, were instructed that these clips were distractions. The participants' main goal was to remember the ambiguous events they saw and distinguish them from a new set of altered - more negative - events from the old items seen at encoding. A main effect of ambiguous events ethnicity was found, which could be interpreted as part icipants having more difficulty remembering black actors.

Research in second language acquisition reveals that adults have difficulty
learning the grammatical aspects of a foreign language. The present study investigated
the efficacy of three teaching methods that were predicted to help adults better learn the
grammar of a foreign language. First, lessons were presented in small pieces that
gradually increased to full sentences. Second, lesson trials were blocked such that
multiple examples of sentences with the same object or verb were presented
consecutively. Third, participants were instructed to gesture the actions of the verbs
within sentences. All three methods were predicted to increase the likelihood of learning
the grammar form of sentences through guiding adults’ attention to fewer components of language input at a time. In Experiment 1, 82 English native speakers played an
adventure videogame designed for the learning of French vocabulary and grammar of
French sentences for two one-hour sessions. All three methods were incorporated in the lessons portion of the game resulting in a 2(incremental vs. full sentence) X 2(blocked vs. unblocked order) X 2(gesture vs. no gesture) between subjects design. The results from Experiment 1 revealed a) more nouns were acquired than verbs and b) a trend that the incremental conditions performed worse than the full sentence conditions on the grammar measures. In Experiment 2, 110 adult learners played the French videogame, but only the blocked presentation and gesture imitation methods were incorporated in the lessons portion (omitting the method of incremental presentation). The results from Experiment 2 revealed a) conditions with either method of blocked presentation or gesturing performed better on vocabulary and grammar measures than the unblocked non-gesture condition, and b) the combination of blocked presentation and gesturing led to better learning of inductive grammar than either method alone. The outcome of the study suggests gesturing and blocked order teaching methods that encourage adults to attend to a few but important components within a sentence are advantageous in learning the grammar of a foreign language.

In point-light models, visual cues are reduced to points of light indicating the major points of movements of the human body. Although we are able to recognize people through movement, accuracy of identification of strangers through point-light models is low. Connecting the major points of motion to represent a skeleton might enhance the ability to recognize strangers. This study also wishes to assess whether accuracy will be improved through learning general movement characteristics of individuals. After a learning stage, participants were randomly assigned to match names with either point-light or skeleton models of actor movements. Two of the four actions performed by actors in the testing stage were previously seen during the learning stage. We expect identification from skeleton displays will be higher than for point light displays. We also expect higher accuracy for actions previously seen during the learning stage. The findings and their implications will be discussed.

The present research was designed to test whether 3-year-old-English-speaking children preferentially associate novel nouns with intrinsic motion rather than extrinsic motion, as predicted by the theory of Kersten (1998). Intrinsic motion refers to the ways the parts of an object move in relation to one another. In contrast, extrinsic motion refers to the motion of an object as a whole with respect to an external reference point (e.g. another object). In two separate experiments, we demonstrated that nouns are associated with intrinsic motion and verbs are associated with extrinsic motion. Specifically, children were able to detect differences between stimuli paired with novel nouns based on intrinsic motion and stimuli paired with novel verbs based on extrinsic motion. In other words, we shed light on the different motion cues children attend to when learning nouns and verbs. Thus, children utilize motion cues in addition to static characteristics when learning nouns and verbs. Therefore, distinct types of motion information play an important role in the learning of nouns and verbs.